I want to tell you about the Living language Basics Japanese course book. This is the first course book I ever bought and I must say I personally like this book, it has a lot of common situations in Japanese that they teach and it comes with 3 audio disk's of Japanese. It does not start off with kanji or kana until you understand some romaji, they would usually have it at the end of the book until you understand the structure of using them. They even add some some jokes in the book in Japanese, (not super funny) but I think it will make you chuckle a bit if you like Japanese humor. After every lesson there would be a vocabulary list for you to study to prepare you for the next upcoming one.Then with some fill in the blank sentence questions,also with a word match. They give you a lot of examples on how to write a letter in Japanese and some vital culture tips. Also I believe they updated their book with more helpful resources with more characters integrated. Overall I think Living language Japanese Basic course is a good book for any beginner in Japanese! I also made a video about the book if your still curious about it

Thanks for this! I myself use Living Language (but for Italian and not Japanese). I am using the Ultimate version, which I really love because aside from the things you mentioned, the course also comes with a mobile app, access to online lessons and tutorials with a native speaker. I have not had any tutorials. But I like the online lessons because they reinforce the lessons presented in the book.